Drupal 7 Release Progress Report

The Drupal (news, site) team's massive push toward Drupal 7 continues. There are a few changes to deadlines and expected features, but so far somehow it's all coming together, despite the daunting scope of the changes.

Feature Status

Drupal 7 is currently in Code Freeze. Previously, the maintainers had identified ten exceptions that they would allow to continue updating even through the Code Slush phase. Of those ten, the following made it in:

Imagefield

Field translations

Convert taxonomy to field API

Edit anywhere

Shortcuts

Dashboard

Plugin manager

RDF/RDFa

Of the two that are missing, overlays has received an additional exception since it's so close to being complete. However, converting the profile module to the field API will have to wait for a later release.

Otherwise, there are no more API changes and no additional features going into Drupal 7 at this point.

What Next?

Dries Buytaert states that at this point, the Drupal project focuses on usability, accessibility and performance. If API changes turn out to be necessary for any of these three issues, he and co-maintainer Angie "webchick" Byron will decide on a patch-by-patch basis whether to allow the changes or not.

Original plans called for this phase to end on November 15th, four weeks from API freeze. Instead, Buytaert has extended it to December 1st, at which point the project enters String and UI Freeze.

After that point only bug fixes and SimpleTest issues will be addressed until Drupal 7 is ready for release.

Buytaert requests that Drupal project members focus on the following for the remaining five weeks: